Due to growing pressure among competitors in regards to pricing in recent years, the production print industry has been struggling to trim print cost. These costs include: printers and peripheral devices, including maintenance and click charges; print servers and processors specific to the pre-processing of print files; paper; toner and other supplies; floor space; special air conditioning and monitoring equipment; power; operations staff; management overhead; disposal of waste paper; and disaster contingency. Among all major cost factors, supply costs remain highest on the list of factors that most customers are unable to measure with more than one-fourth of the total cost of printing and more than two-thirds of supply costs due to a single component toner. It would seem that estimating toner usage, either at the pre-flight stage or at run-time, would be straightforward and achievable. However, various factors, especially environment-related parameters directly associated with specific print shops, seriously complicate the task of precisely estimating toner usage. Such a task is further complicated by the limitations of existing technology and customers' tight budgets.
One common method for estimating toner usage involves some form of averaging. There are also a number of inexpensive “percent coverage” calculating tools on the market. Such tools take either a highlighted portion of a screen or a page of a Post Script file and generate numerical coverage for the selected portion. They claim to target both print shops and home printer users, but seem to require an immense amount of human involvement and, because they do not take into account the characteristics of the actual printer used, among other factors, they may lack sufficient accuracy in many cases. Whether toner usage is estimated by averaging or by the use of one of the available tools, the approach is error-prone and over time contributes to inconsistency and unpredictability in the businesses' pricing and cost-accounting systems.
Calculating accurate toner estimates is a computationally intensive process. Moreover, the “output” industry is highly cyclical based on monthly, quarterly, seasonal or annual needs of printers' customers. For example, a printer whose customers generate monthly bills may have a large volume of work for a short period of each month and a smaller volume the rest of the month. The same printer may have an even larger volume during the spring when many publicly-held companies generate annual reports. If the printer acquires print capacity to handle its normal volume of work, it may not be able to accommodate large, cyclical volumes. Conversely, if the printer acquires print capacity (including hardware) for its peak volume, much of that capacity may sit idle the rest of the time. Thus, sizing for peak loads leads to increased costs and wasted capacity.
Consequently, those in the industry are seeking a tool that is capable of accurately estimating toner usage and does not require the acquisition of substantial in-house computing resources in excess of day-to-day needs.